Literary pretendings, off-the-cuff insights and the occasional rant.

"Mother died today"? Or "Maman died today"? Or...

There's a fascinating piece here by The New Yorker's Ryan Bloom over the French-to-English translation of the first line of Camus' The Stranger. As Bloom notes, a single word can color one's reading of an entire novel. Speaking of which, though I haven't decided on novels to read for this year's Summer of Classics, I'm definitely going much more modern to escape the 19th Century slogs of past years, and The Stranger is on my short list.